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Most Interesting Thing About Desalination

Desalination removes the salts from water, but did you know it was possible to remove salts using salts. Called a hydrate former, a quaternary ammonium salt can be used to isolate fresh water in a hydrate structure where water forms a cage around the hydrate former and freezes. This hydrate ice can then be removed, melted, and filtered to allow the collection of fresh water with relative ease. All that is required is low temperatures and high pressure, which can be found in generally every city or converted from possible lost resources during oil production. This hydrate former is probably the most important process and the most interesting thing that I have found in the hydrate desalination process.

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How Hydrates Help YOU!

When we wake up each morning, we probably go off to drink a cup of water, brush our teeth, use the bathroom, cook breakfast, or take a shower, but how many of these things that we do every morning require the use of fresh, clean water? If you have said all of them, then you would be correct, because fresh, clean water is as important to us as clean air and food in our stomachs. So how does this apply to the research we are doing here? Well, the idea is that with the limited access to fresh water, we shouldn't have a problem with it since there is so much on this planet, right? I mean there is currently 70% of our planet covered in water, yet we can't use it, why? Because it is filled with salt! How could we drink salt water or use it to make our food when it would dry us out faster than a hot summer day? We can't, so the research that we are doing allows us to produce fresh, clean water out of sea water, salt water, and something called produced water, which comes from oils production. So how are we doing this? Well hydrates are shells made of water that allow us to collect fresh water and isolate it. This is pretty cool right? Well it get's even better, the power of hydrates is still unknown, and the possibilities are being discovered everyday, so that one day, we might be able to make fresh water from oil, or the sea. So if you're curious, stay tuned, there's more coming, because today we are finding out, tomorrow we are applying, and the next we are using. It's that simple.

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If you had guessed a Rheometer, you would be correct! Otherwise, it's okay if you don't know much about this technology. It's a relatively new piece that measures the energy that is required to transfer a substance in one place to another, meaning in other terms, it measures the viscosity that a liquid has at different temperatures. Viscosity is simply the measure of how well a substance moves from one place to another, and this technology is being used to advance the desalination process by understanding how hydrates, an important force used for separating freshwater from produced water, or salt water, flows under different temperatures and pressures. Interested? Stay tune for more on this technology and many more happening at the University of Tulsa's Solar and Alternative Technologies Research Course over the summer of 2021.

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Can you guess what this device is? It is used in just about every industry to test how temperature and pressure change a flowing liquid. Tune in tomorrow to find out what and how this technology is used to advance the desalination process.